subject: How To Protect Yourself From Identity Theft Today [print this page] I. D. theft is everywhere nowadays. No company or individual who has tried a Visa card online is safe from criminal hackers and social engineering thieves. And although giant firms might have the most info that ID thieves can focus on, smaller corporations can still yield hundreds or thousands of credit card numbers.
One of the methods these criminals use is to rob a huge list of credit card numbers and then begin making numerous little charges on each one of them. Many consumers may not even recognize a collection of charges for between $2 and $6 on their bank statement. But a cash loan of $30 worth of charges over one thousand credit cards is highly lucrative for burglars.
There's also just about nil risk in taking credit cards from online merchants and using them. While much of this type of burglary goes unreported, even the cases that are reported to the police end up going nowhere. A purchaser in Ohio may purchase something from a website in California that's hacked by an individual in Tennessee who uses a Visa card to initiate a fraudulent charge in New Jersey. Where do local authorities even start to address this?
Federal and state regulatory agencies are also ill-equipped to deal with such instances of fraud on credit cards. For $30 in disputed charges per account, the central government can not spend hundreds of dollars per case. While there could be a good chance of catching the thieves, a lot of the money may be gone, making tracking down small-time ID thieves a losing financial proposition for the govt. .
As well , disputing a complete list of charges to get them removed from a bank or Visa card account is definitely a waste of time for shoppers. The companies that took the fraudulent charges will not answer telephones, not return voice mails, or refuse to repay the charge without a police report or other evidence of crime. This is a large amount of work to get back $4.95, and many patrons will just not bother to follow it.
While banks may accept disputes and refund cash to consumers who are targets of these bad guys, the banks most frequently recover nothing from the thieves. Instead, money is put aside in a reserve account to cover these cash advance losses. But the funds for the reserve show up in increased rates and costs for all banking patrons, as the costs of ID theft are passed along to the consumers anyhow.
Unfortunately, it seems that it is easier to make money through the drug trade, ID theft, and other black market activities. It is also just as dodgy as holding an ordinary job in these tough economic times. Being caught and facing monetary judgments or community service is not actually all that worse than being laid off, foreclosed, and homeless. And while the costs of ID theft are passed along to consumers, the expenses of foreclosure and job loss sometimes affect only local families and communities.
